Concrete Reasons For A Ski Weekend
- Dan Synge
- Mar 21
- 3 min read
Aren’t ski resorts supposed to convey a timeless chocolate box world of cute timber chalets, archaic church spires and smoky chimneys that point to epic star-filled skies?
Think of Zermatt nestled cosily on the Swiss side of the Matterhorn, marvellous Meribel or Saas Fee, which is so like a winter destination of the popular imagination that Wham! made their Last Christmas video there.
After years of twee Alpine retreats, it was a shock therefore to find myself staying briefly in Europe’s alleged ‘ugliest ski resort’ Flaine, situated just over an hour’s drive from Geneva.
We arrived in the middle of night and so the town’s stark, brutalist appearance wasn’t immediately obvious. But hobbling in our ski boots towards the equipment hire shop in the town’s Forum area, it was plain to see we had entered an unapologetic 1960s concrete utopia.
Like the much-maligned Thamesmead estate near Woolwich, chosen as the dystopian urban backdrop to Stanley Kubrick’s A Chocolate Orange, Flaine’s calling card is towering multi-storey apartment blocks and the sort of exposed concrete walkways and underpasses you might find at The Barbican or Trellick Tower, only these are designed to ease the daily routine of skiers and their families.
The slopes themselves are easily accessed on foot or via utilitarian orange lifts, presumably to spare users the steep incline to the west-facing part of the resort. People come to ski here largely because of its natural position at the base of a vast snow covered bowl whose very edge reveals the even more impressive Mont Blanc range.
Looking back to admire the view, you can clearly see the outline of Flaine in the narrow valley below. It's all straight, boring lines and seemingly without ornamentation or traditional Haute-Savoie flourishes such as sloping rooves and folksy wooden shutters. It’s as if some post-war Parisian banlieue had been plonked down there.
Flaine’s aesthetic is not to everyone’s taste, of course, but there remains a practical and user-friendly aspect to its central Forum area of hotels, shops, cafes and even an ecumenical chapel. Meanwhile, the more residential Flaine Foret and Hameau de Flaine neighbourhoods sit neatly on the slopes behind. There can’t be many high-altitude ski resorts that can boast both Bauhaus-inspired architecture and public works of art by Picasso, Victor Vasarely and Jean Dubuffet.
The dream to build this unique French resort started when wealthy visionary Eric Boissonnas and his wife Sylvie had the idea for an architectural blueprint for which ‘the immediate profitability of which would be less important than aesthetic choices and respect for the environment’. The couple had lived in the US after the war and had seen for themselves the impact of mid-century modern on both public architecture and residential living. Although the ambitious mountain village was first conceived in the late 1950s, a time when France’s infrastructure was still recovering from the ravages of war, Flaine didn’t actually open for business until January 1969.
Art connoisseur Boissonnas brought on board some of the greatest names of 20th century art and design including op artist Victor Vasarely and Marcel Breuer, an early student of the Bauhaus school and designer of the tubular constructed Wassily club chair as well as buildings such as The Whitney Museum in New York. On arrival to the site by helicopter, the great architect is meant to have said: “What a wonderful site! How do we avoid spoiling it?”
Breuer’s most impressive contribution to the scheme was his dramatic Flaine Hotel (1968), a modernist apartment building which not only squares up to the mountains surrounding it but seemingly defies gravity with his distinctive cantilevered sun deck visible from the town’s lower slopes. Breuer and his team used locally sourced pre-cast concrete in the construction. Like other buildings in the resort it faces south, a factor which enhances the interplay between natural light and shadow.
Much like the landmark buildings Fallingwater in rural Pennsylvania or The Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs, Flaine Hotel perfectly delivers the modernist credo of pure functionality and the seamless integration with the natural environment around it.
That said, Flaine hasn’t been without its detractors, either before or since its inception. Before this modernist masterpiece began to take shape, local farmers and landowners took years to agree on the amount of compensation they were owed, while the team itself fell out over creative differences. One of Boissonnas’s business partners described him disparagingly as “a poet suffering from having 40 billion Francs.”
The ski loving multimillionaire, who died aged 92 in 2005, could indeed be accused of fulfilling his brutalist fantasy at the expense of the wild and rugged environment around it, yet this cleverly planned purpose-built resort stands up surprisingly well almost 60 years after this vision was realised. Oh, and the skiing isn’t too bad either.
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